No, private schools aren’t victims of ‘reverse discrimination’ – and Cambridge should know better |
A Cambridge college’s plan to target students from some of the country’s most elite private schools has struck a nerve. As reported by the Guardian, Trinity Hall justified the move by claiming that a focus only on “greater fairness in admissions” could “unintentionally result in reverse discrimination”. Alumni LinkedIn feeds and social media threads quickly filled with outrage, as many Cambridge graduates interpreted the move as class prejudice rearing its ugly head once again. One angry fellow at the college said it amounted to a “slap in the face” for their state-educated undergraduates.
It brought back memories of the sneering snobbery at Oxford when the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, then principal of Lady Margaret Hall, introduced a new foundation year. “We don’t do hard luck stories,” sniffed one academic. “Oxford doesn’t do remedial education,” complained another. The foundation year at Oxford and also at Cambridge has since enjoyed huge success, proving that students who have faced great adversity or academic disadvantage can flourish when given the chance.
The words “reverse discrimination” are jarring. Whatever the intentions behind Trinity Hall’s policy, singling out a tiny cadre of already highly resourced schools sends a powerful signal: that academic quality is most reliably found there, and moving beyond this clique risks lowering standards. In a society marked by extreme inequalities in wealth, schooling and........